Thursday 19 July 2012 09.16 EDT
First published on Thursday 19 July 2012 09.16 EDT

It's an overstatement to claim, as one festival freesheet here implies, that director Simon McBurney's presence as the Avignon festival's artistic associate is, the Queen's Jubilee excepted, the British event of 2012. There is, of course, the small matter of that modest sports day in East London.

Nonetheless, it places Complicite's artistic director alongside the greatest in Europe. Thomas Ostermeier, Romeo Castellucci and Jan Fabre have held the post since the festival's artistic directors, Hortense Archambault and Vincent Baudriller – both still in their 30s – took over in 2004.

Complicite's The Master and Margarita, seen at London's Barbican in March, has been given the festival's most famous stage, the Cour d'Honneur. It's an extraordinary space. Vast, roofless and surrounded by 24-metre-high stone walls, it's a 2,000-seat studio theatre in a 14th-century castle and yet it's astonishingly intimate. It also adds an aptly demonic charge to this adaptation of Bulgakov's famously uncategorisable novel, which includes everything from a scene in which Satan visits Stalin's Moscow to a re-creation of Pontius Pilate's Jerusalem. Bats squeal like fireworks. The wind whips around the courtyard and across the stage, lashing costumes and shifting furniture.

What becomes abundantly clear is how much Es Devlin has designed the show with this space in mind. It comes alive in ways that it didn't in the Barbican; in particular, Finn Ross's video projections, zooming in and out of satellite photos of Moscow and finally seeming to bulldoze those solid stone walls. Suddenly, the Master and Margarita becomes an Imax experience, and it's breathtaking.

The festival has another startling space: the Carrièrre de Boulbon, a huge disused quarry 15km from the city, first used for Peter Brook's sprawling version of The Mahabarata in 1985. This year, it hosts the French singer Camille, a remarkably captivating performer with the brio and abandon of the greatest actors. In Ilo Veyou, she turns her entire body into an instrument, beating her chest for vibrato and stomping so forcefully you begin to worry about the potential for landslides. One or two songs tend towards over-cuteness – Bubbling You, for example, is Max Bygraves, bathroom-based whimsy with a Gallic twist – but in her earthier, folksy sections, she matches the setting.

Elsewhere, my rusty GCSE French has been stretched to breaking point by French new writing. The three shows I've seen have all shared a focus on contemporary anxieties. A gay, Moroccan schoolboy is clubbed to death with a motorcycle helmet by three older students in La Faculté by Christophe Honoré (writer-director of the film Beloved). Honoré's play is a murder mystery, one that shows whodunit – but not why. Are their motives racist, homophobic or the nihilistic ennui of a hopeless generation? Eric Vigner's production is played with a similar style to some of Simon Stephens' work. His young actors, all students, deliver dialogue between characters while facing down their audience, with a confrontational and self-conscious edge. However, there is a vain slickness to the design. The piece takes place in a school playground filled with white sand – which seemed much more interesting before I remembered that the repeated line 'il neige' means 'it's snowing' – and Vigner's urbane costumes (tiny shorts and maroon suits) suggest maniacal catwalk models, rather than disaffected youth.

Séverine Chavrier's Plage Ultime (Ultimate Track) fuses various Ballardian ideas about urban meltdown into a series of skits: dodgems swerve into fatal car accidents; airport baggage-handlers face a Tartaran flow of luggage. A queue at a drinks machine turns feral, and objects are hurled over motorway walkways. The city seems to short-circuit and self-destruct. So too, however, does Chavrier's production, too stop-start for its own good and adding little that Ballard hasn't already established.

Ballard himself would probably have loved the setting for Guillaume Vincent's La Nuit Tombe … (Night Is Falling): an unchanging hotel room that shifts location and slowly fills up with nightmares. There are dead birds, electric surges and bursts of war, somewhat reminiscent of Sarah Kane's Blasted. Two sisters exchange gifts – identical communion dresses and funeral wreaths. A child splashes in the off-stage bathroom before the door slams shut, water surging underneath. A man opens his hand and releases two Red Admiral butterflies. Even if I lost track of its three fragmented narratives, which segue between fantasy, memory and reality – perhaps as a result – Vincent's production left my spine tingling with its scare tactics and slow-dawning horrors.